This tweet implies the necessary existence of a single person who most drags down the intelligence of the English corpus. We can guess this person is: - Male (high variance) - Very intelligent - Prolific - Polymath - Widely imitated and discussed - Wrong about nearly everything

A clever thing the other site has done to motivate people to rush to switch is these 'starter packs' of accounts who write about particular topics, e.g. AI governance. Folks mass follow them. So the people who joined early and got on a major list have been racking up followers.

It's honestly ridiculous how journalists are sleeping on this story with ~everything they need to know already being shared publicly. AI company staff are telling the truth about the impact they expect their work to have. Miles left OpenAI 3 weeks ago and agrees:

There were a lot of great people at this conference. My biggest qualm, though: it was hard to figure out what the attendees meaningfully disagreed about. So my challenge to the progress studies community is: what should the big live debates in the field be?

A lot of Dem tastemakers (eg @ezraklein and @PodSaveAmerica) have been discussing the need to widen their tent. How can “heterodox” institutional critics usefully interact with them? My sense is that three mostly distinct blobs have formed: 1) The progressive blob, the…

Collecting open secrets I think people are endlessly fascinating. Sometimes you meet a person and they have such an interesting or strange life that you wonder how it could be possible. But then you spend more time with them and then you figure out exactly why things are the way…

It happened again this morning, and it’s sadly becoming a joke at this point. I walked into Starbucks, and the shelf that just a couple of days ago was full of holiday merchandise for the new season was completely empty. Again. When I asked the barista, they confirmed it:…

How many left-leaning accounts have recently left X? X isn't saying, but I was surprised to learn that @JamesSurowiecki — a moderate liberal, not a progressive — has lost about 4% of his followers since the election. 4% may not seem like much, but...

Actually, this symbolic gesture strikes me as extremely important. It's a big deal to have agreement in principle on not going extinct in the dumbest ways -- even if they haven't identified all the worst dangers, yet. My gratitude to anyone who worked on either side of this.

Amazon Prime is now inserting ads into full price rental movies? Please go die in a fire

So I tried to build a tech company from Norway and here’s what happened: 1. Two years of building without almost any money/funding, better part of a year without salary 2. Raise VC and become one of Norway’s first unicorns 3. Face unrealized gains wealth tax bill of many x my…

"RFK Jr. takes credit for the work done by Ozempic" is thoroughly absolutely dystopian and also going to happen if he's nominated thanks I hate it.

Wow, I did NOT know this: Buddhist logicians had discovered the Gettier problem c. 770 AD:

UK justice system hard at work. Nine year-old calling classmate "retard": Police investigation. Pakistani-ancestry men in Rotherham raping, honor killing, and grooming 1,400 girls for sex: Police and social services cover up investigation findings and ethnicity of offenders.

Elon Musk emails OpenAI cofounders September 20, 2017

A mini-rant about how to cut government waste: I'm excited to see how @elonmusk, @VivekGRamaswamy, and @DOGE will reduce gov't waste & increase efficiency. But I hope they don't just start cutting departments, programs, and jobs that sound silly, but that don't actually cost…

Sam Harris on why critique of the media and the establishment must not turn into nihilism. I know what it's like to read an article in the New York Times and to spot obvious lies. But the alternative to the failure of journalism simply isn't the firehose of lies, half-truths,…

I think a lot of young men in modernity are ashamed of the fact that they can’t change the oil in their car or install a deadbolt on a door or troubleshoot a failing electrical outlet. I wouldn’t argue that they should learn these things if it were just a matter of practicality.…

As it turns out, Kamala didn't go on Rogan because they were afraid of their staffers. They're prisoners of the people who work for them, and they need start sending different signals to attract a different kind of employee.

It would be great if we could get wokeness and overregulation swept away without also getting compromised and incompetent people running the government. But I worry that's too much to hope for.